A Seoul Neighborhood Doesn't Want a School for North Korean Teens Next Door
Residents in Seoul's Gangseo District have spent weeks protesting a permanent campus for Yeomyung School, which educates North Korean defector teenagers, and the argument over land, broken promises, and who gets a say gives your class a real, unresolved fight to work through.
Park English2026-09-253 min read
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Here's the story, stripped down. Seoul's education office wants to build a permanent home for Yeomyung School, an alternative high school for teenagers who fled North Korea, on the site of a shuttered elementary school in Gangseo District. The plan is to renovate the former Seoul Yeomgang Elementary School, which closed in 2020, to house both Yeomyung School and the city's Early Childhood Education and Promotion Center. Some nearby residents formed an opposition group and held a signature drive. At a town hall meant to calm things down, the school's principal dropped to her knees in front of the crowd and begged, "Please embrace the children." Roughly a hundred people were in the room.
This isn't Yeomyung's first fight. The school was established in Gwanak-gu in 2004, relocated to Jung-gu in 2008, sought to move to Eunpyeong-gu in 2019 but abandoned that plan amid resident opposition, and eventually moved to its current leased site in Gangseo-gu in 2023, where the lease expires in February 2027. Some of the money behind the new building is corporate: Hyundai Motor Group provided 6 billion won ($4.3 million) in July to support the renovation. Some of the residents' anger is procedural — they say they were told the site was only ever meant to be temporary, and some placards read something close to "No Yeomyung School without residents' consent." That's the version worth putting in front of a class, because nobody in the room is pretending to be neutral, and your students won't either.
Why this works as a discussion
Your high schoolers already have an opinion on North Korean defectors, on property values, and on whether a neighborhood gets to vote on who moves in next door. This story makes them argue about all three at once without you having to invent a hypothetical.
| For building the school there | Against building the school there |
|---|---|
| The lease runs out in February 2027 — the students need somewhere to go | Residents say the site was promised as temporary, not permanent |
| Government and corporate funding are already committed | The property was earmarked for a children's facility, and some residents want that honored instead |
| Two earlier relocation attempts collapsed under the same kind of protest | A neighborhood should have some say in what gets built near their homes |
| These are teenagers who already struggle to fit into mainstream schools | Nobody consulted residents before the decision was made public |
Running it in 50 minutes
- Warm-up (5 min): ask what "NIMBY" means before you define it. Someone usually knows.
- Background (10 min): read the handout aloud, or have students read it silently, then check comprehension with two or three quick questions.
- Pair debate (15 min): assign sides, don't let students pick their own — they argue harder for a position they don't already hold.
- Open discussion (15 min): drop the hardest question last — should residents get a vote on who their neighbors are?
- Wrap (5 min): one sentence each, no defending it, just stating it.
So here's the honest part. This story hadn't resolved by the time this lesson was written — the city said it would proceed, but the residents' group hadn't backed down. Tell your class that up front. A discussion where the ending is still unwritten tends to run better than one where everyone already knows how it turns out.